The Research archive provides access to all Research articles published in past issues of Communications of the ACM.
July 2020
From Communications of the ACM
Spectre Attacks: Exploiting Speculative Execution
This paper describes practical attacks that combine methodology from side-channel attacks, fault attacks, and return-oriented programming that can read arbitrary memory from the victim's process.
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Why 'Correct' Computers Can Leak Your Information
"Spectre Attacks: Exploiting Speculative Execution," by Paul Kocher, et al., reviews how speculative execution and caches can be exploited, presents specific exploits using speculative branches that are direct and indirect, and…
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: ASIC Clouds: Specializing the Datacenter
Can we build purpose-built, warehouse-scale datacenters customized for large-scale arrays of ASIC accelerators or, to use a term coined in the paper by Michael Bedford Taylor, et al., ASIC clouds?
From Communications of the ACM
ASIC Clouds: Specializing the Datacenter for Planet-Scale Applications
This paper distills lessons from Bitcoin ASIC Clouds and applies them to other large scale workloads, showing superior TCO (total cost of ownership) versus CPU and GPU.